Theme: Review

Nobel laureate Imre Kertész is certainly no stranger to controversy. His radical reconceptualization of the term “Holocaust” — in whose “unscrupulous employment” he locates “a cowardly and unimaginative glibness” — to extend beyond the scope of the concentration camps and those who perished therein, rhetorically privileges the survivors over the dead: “the word [Holocaust] actually only relates to those who were incarcerated: the dead, but not the survivors... The survivor is an exception.”Read more

Writing in response to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the first systematic attempt by the US government to police the internet, John Perry Barlow - former lyricist for the Grateful Dead - made a celebrated Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. In resonant tones that echoed those of the Founding Fathers, Barlow addressed the “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel”, declaring “the global space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us”.Read more

One of the strengths of BioShock Infinite, acknowledged less often than its expansive and detailed historical-revisionist steampunk setting, is the way its narrative is punctuated. The extended forays down cobblestone streets – and the intermittent murderous rampages – are connective tissue, linking a series of scenes that are genuinely, jarringly emotional.Read more

Late in 2011, Michiko Kakutani opened her New York Times review of Claire Tomalin’s biography of Charles Dickens with “a remarkable account” she had found in its pages. In London for a few days in 1862, Fyodor Dostoevsky had dropped in on Dickens’s editorial offices and found the writer in an expansive mood.Read more

Readers of contemporary art criticism may have come across the following story about Michael Fried. Fellow critic Rosalind Krauss was with Fried at a show in the early 1960s when someone confronted him about a Frank Stella painting. “What’s so good about that?” the challenger asked. According to Krauss, Fried told the young man that, on some days, Stella went to the Metropolitan and stared for hours on end at the Velázquez paintings there.Read more

The Russian Revolution upended the lives of Vladimir Nabokov and his family. Leaving behind an aristocratic world of colossal wealth and privilege (a world about which he could speak of “the smallest and oldest of our gardeners”), Nabokov would become an exile in Berlin, where he supported himself as a tutor, teaching French, English and tennis.Read more

Through this collection of articles, Thomas Vaessens and Yra van Dijk attempt to gauge the current state of postmodern literature in Europe. Besides an important introduction by the editors, which I will discuss at length, the volume contains twelve separate essays. Ten of these chapters concern the modern situation in specific European literatures,Read more

In what Alain Badiou calls his "hyper-translation" of Plato's Republic, we are taken into the world of Plato's classic dialogue on politics and justice, sped up to the pace of a 21st century New York street corner. Socrates and his sophist interlocutors speak a gritty street talk that is both accessible and familiar, despite the fact they invoke intellectual figures from St. Paul to Jacques Lacan to the mathematician Paul Cohen.Read more

The Anglo-Irish Ascendancy were an odd mixture of the soft-headed and the hard-nosed. If they could be a dreamy, spook-ridden, eccentric bunch, they also had a keen eye for the price of an acre or the cost of a domestic servant. Washed up by history and finally dispossessed by their own state, their more progressive wing could nevertheless see themselves as in the van of modernity, held back by a bunch of benighted papists.Read more

Kerouac was susceptible to film—a sucker for its promise of riches as well as its flickering poetry—and he imagined an iconic adaptation of On the Road. Not long after the book’s publication, in September 1957, he wrote to Marlon Brando asking him to buy the book and get it made:Read more

Kurzweil has honors from three US presidents (so says Wikipedia) and was the “principal inventor of the first CCD flatbed scanner” and other useful devices, as well as receiving many other entrepreneurial awards. He is clearly a man of many parts—but is ultimate theoretician of the mind one of them?Read more

"Together, we might be able to do dangerous subversive things, mischievous things."1 Such is Andy Merrifield’s opening promise in his recent book Magical Marxism: Subversive Politics and the Imagination. Merrifield situates the work between two poles of people: those who are more or less orthodox Marxists and those who are Marxists but don’t know it.Read more

Homeland is an inside look into who is keeping America safe from terrorist attacks. Answer: it’s a 33 year-old woman named Carrie, whose sex life is under surveillance. Carrie, played by Claire Danes, was 21 when 9/11 happened. For some inexplicable reason, she can’t forgive herself for not preventing the attacks.Read more

Helprin’s latest novel, In Sunlight and in Shadow, can be read as an elegy for the American Century. Helprin’s emphasis on invidividual responsibility, as well as his backwards-lookingness, over-the-topness, and magical thinking, give us a window into the Republican Party he supports.Read more

Kant lectured on a variety of topics through his career, including logic, metaphysics and ethics, but also on topics that were not strictly philosophical including anthropology, education and geography. Geography was one of his most popular—the most reliable figures suggest lectures on this topic were given forty-nine times from 1756-1796. The Anthropology lectures were an offshoot of this material; initially geography alone, then in later years geography in the summer semester and anthropology in the winter.Read more

There’s a scene in Breaking Bad, a third of the way through the 54 episodes shot and screened on US TV so far, that marks a significant moment in the gradual passage of its central character, Walter White, from hero to villain. Walter, a middle-aged high school chemistry teacher who’s become a manufacturer of illegal drugs, is walking down the aisle of a DIY superstore in his home town of Albuquerque, New Mexico, buying paint for his basement, when another customer’s laden trolley catches his eye.Read more

The world of mathematics is a dissenter’s paradise. Although mathematical reasoning binds the mind to rigor and constrains it to obey rules of inference and to accept semantic conventions shared by the community of its practitioners, the world of mathematics at large, in society and in our imagination, is replete with diversity, disagreement and discontent.Read more

I mean that the poem, and it’s like a lot of Seidel’s work, dresses his poetry in all the accoutrements of deliberate engagement with issues of class and color and need and responsibility, of inequity and iniquity, and all that equipment ought to be used. The speaker shows no indication that he knows what he’s talking about or why he’s talking about it. He notices a bunch of angles on ethics, but settles for a minimally competent aesthetics, when he could have had both. He’s a compulsively yapping set of dingy teeth.Read more

Nearly a decade ago, I sat in a class entitled, quite simply, “Corporations,” taught by Vijay Prashad at Trinity College. Over the course of the semester, I was amazed at the extent of Prashad’s knowledge, and the complexity and erudition of his style. He has since authored a number of classic books that have gained recognition throughout the world.Read more

In September 1999, as Jimmy Corrigan was nearing completion, Ware visited the preserved apartment of the outsider artist Henry Darger. Darger had lived an isolated existence, working feverishly on thousands upon thousands of pages of eccentric fiction and drawings. Read more